Scammers have created fake Facebook accounts for MH17 victims, including the three young Perth children who died with their grandfather

Victims targeted by the scam include young Perth siblings Otis, Evie and Mo Maslin, Canberra woman Liliane Derden and Fatima Dyczynski, who was born in Germany but was on flight MH17 because she was moving to Perth.

The scam also exploited the names of victims from other countries, including Quinn Lucas Schansman from the US, British-born Kiwi Rob Ayley, Malaysia Airlines pilot Eugene Choo Jin Leong and Richard Mayne, Ben Pocock and Liam Sweeney from the UK.

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Facebook has taken down the pages but the external site goalshighlights.com remains live. It was registered in Bucharest, Romania in 2010 and the ISP address tracks back to the Netherlands.

Ken Gamble, chairman of the Australian chapter of the International Association of Cybercrime Prevention, said it looked like the website had been hacked in order to divert to adult hook up websites and others selling counterfeit drugs.

Online fraud experts said the pages were in poor taste but would only be forcibly removed by Facebook if they were criminal

'I've seen this quite a lot, hackers get in, take control of a site and they then divert to a stack of stuff and use the bandwidth of this guy's website sometimes for illegal purpose sometimes or for getting the hits up on certain sites,' Mr Gamble said.

He added that the websites that goalshighlights.com diverted to contained malicious files that would infect a user's computer if clicked on.

Canberra mother-of-two Liliane Derden was one of the victims targeted by the scam

Mr Gamble added that fraudsters often capitalised on disasters like the MH17 crash.

'When a disaster like this happens it's a great opportunity for all sorts of scammers,' Mr Gamble told Daily Mail Australia.

'Everybody is out there looking for information at the moment, everyone wants to know more about what's happened.

'It's a great opportunity to prey on people's vulnerabilities and emotion is the greatest one.'

Scammers aim to lure a portion of the high amount of internet traffic going to websites with MH17 information, Mr Gamble said.

'Some people will be using it for an opportunity to market their sites, it's a good way to bring a massive amount of traffic to someone's site,' he said.

'Other offenders will be doing this for more sinister purposes.'

Before the Facebook pages were removed users expressed outrage, labelling them 'disgusting' and the person who created them a 'sicko'.

Others reported the pages to Facebook as spam in the hope of getting them taken down.

But some Facebook users did not realise the pages were fake, posting heartfelt messages to the page.

'Incredible, terrible...To lose your kids in this way...Such beautiful lovely children...no words...' one person wrote on the page of Mo Maslin.

'We pray for all the Australian people, especially the children god will take care of them in his safe hands let the stars shine bright for u so u know that ur not alone,' another person posted.

A spokesman for Facebook said: 'We are disabling these profiles as soon as we are made aware of them.

'We encourage people to block those responsible and report suspicious behaviour to our team of experts via our reporting buttons so that we can quickly take the appropriate action.'